“Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere ⎯ comin’ in bunches, crossin’ and walkin’ and ridin’. Everyone was a-singin. We was all walkin’ on golden clouds. Hallejujah!” This is how Felix Haywood recalled the arrival of Brigadier General Gordon Granger, as he road into Galveston, Texas, with his troops on June 19th, 1865. Granger announced General Orders No. 3 declaring that “in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
Haywood described the fervor of fellow African Americans: “Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that, we was free.” The crowd’s glee would quickly dissipate as the sober reality set in that the order would require significant force to implement. It would take months for those enslaved in the interior of the state to get the word and a full year before all could publicly celebrate the demolition of the last Confederate holdout. Starting in 1866, that day of Jubilee would become a festive annual occasion for political speeches and church sermons extolling the virtues of citizenship duties and rights, accompanied by music and food. Since the 1890s, the day has been called “Juneteenth,” an abbreviation of June nineteenth.
Granger’s announcement was a remarkable event, though noteworthy for coming late and being ferociously resisted. Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery in the Confederate states still in rebellion in January 1863. In truth, very few people were freed as the proclamation applied mainly to those places where federal authority had been nullified. But the prospects for freedom were least likely to be achieved in the westernmost state of the Confederacy that had escaped much military penetration. It’s isolation made it a haven for slaveholders from Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri seeking refuge when their own states were invaded.
The reigns of slavery were tightened even more in the lone star state as they were losing their grip and deteriorating elsewhere in the South. From the beginning of the war women, men, and children ran away to Union lines in droves; many of the rest left behind on plantations turned them into unruly sites of de facto liberty; and black men enlisted as soldiers in the U.S. military in large numbers after Lincoln’s proclamation. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, put the final nail in the coffin of bondage enabling Lincoln’s promissory note to be realized, in most places.